the environmental problems, in different dimensions, are resulted from the lack of environmental considerations and criteria in locating new cities. the main purpose of this article is to compare different criteria based on library studies and expert opinions and determining suitable criteria in order to evaluate the environmental potential to establish new cities to achieve urban permanent dev...

Planning under uncertainty is a key requirement for physical systems due to the noisy nature of actuators and sensors. Using a belief space approach, planning solutions tend to generate actions that result in information seeking behavior which reduce state uncertainty. While recent work has dealt with planning for Gaussian beliefs, for many cases, a multimodal belief is a more accurate represen...

In this paper, we propose a method based on multiple criteria to assist physicians in planning percutaneous RFA on liver. We explain how we extracted information from literature and interviews with radiologists, and formalized them into geometric constraints. We expose then our method to compute the most suitable needle insertion in two steps: computation of authorized insertion zones and multi...

This paper presents a terrain mapping and path planning techniques for a planetary exploration rover. A light detection and ranging (LIDAR) is employed in this work to obtain a point cloud data of the terrain feature. A terrain map converted from the point cloud data is represented with a sector-shaped reference grid, resulting in a digital elevation map with the cylindrical coordinate, called ...

Traditional tour route planning mostly depends on the planner’s experience. However, whether tour route planning is appropriate or not has a considerable impact on the time and cost of the tour. Good planning can save unnecessary waiting time, avoid wasted operating costs, and contribute to the enhancement of the quality of tourism. Therefore, this study applied the ant colony optimization algo...

Renewable energy sources today can provide a promising alternative to conventional power generation, provided some economic, institutional, social and technical barriers could be overcome, and the appropriate planning instruments for their deployment are developed. In Greece, contemporary practice seems inadequate to address the multiple character of renewables and the need to ‘open up’ the dec...

In the policy making process a number of disparate and diverse issues such as economic development, environmental aspects, as well as the social acceptance of the policy, need to be considered. A single person might not have all the required expertises, and decision support systems featuring optimization components can help to assess policies. Leveraging on previous work on Strategic Environmen...

How can search theory and path planning concepts be used to formulate and to solve detection search problems in the context of a ground SAR operation while taking into account practical aspects such as terrain visibility constraints? As an answer to this research question, we have formulated a novel detection search problem to include the searcher’s visibility constraints (the Optimal Searcher ...